August 12, 2023 (MLN): Hundreds of families, who have lost billions of their hard-earned earnings to a fake Singaporean builder operating in Karachi’s defense housing society, have requested Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to investigate the mega real estate scam.
About 300 allottees of the stalled Creek Marina project have written a letter to Noor Alam Khan, the chairman of the anti-corruption watchdog, with a request to start a probe into the multi-billion rupees scam that also involves money laundering.
Meinhardt Singapore PTE Limited (MSPL) and its self-declared owners Shahzad Nasim and his son Omar Shahzad are already under investigation by the Federal Intelligence Agency (FIA) for defrauding investors and the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) through siphoning at least three billion rupees off the allottees of Creek Marina housing project the foreign firm had launched in 2005 in Karachi's posh Defence neighborhood.
The "delinquent foreign company", which has not delivered a single apartment to its customers during the last 18 years, is also accused of laundering at least $2.7 million out of Pakistan to its associates identified as Nasim, Omar, Nudrat Mand Khan, Aisha Varsey, Salman Mand Khan, Richard Charles Coventry, Syed Asghar Ali Shah and Akbar Ai Shakir through fake accounts the company management was operating in local banks.
Foreign companies are required to get the approval of the Board of Investment (BOI) before opening their account in Pakistani banks under the Foreign Exchange Regulations Act 1947, Anti-Money Laundering Act 2010, and the Companies Act 2017.
"The project has been carefully crafted by its owners to not only defraud the public at large by also the DHA," said a letter Syed Daanish Ghazi wrote to the PAC chairman on behalf of the allottees.
Khan, however, seized to be the PAC chief after the dissolution of the National Assembly on August 10. The new PAC chairman is expected to take up the issue once named by the new government.
MSPL, which was registered as an engineering and not a development firm in Singapore, was able to open multiple accounts in Habib Bank, MCB Bank, Meezan Bank, and Silkbank to launder its ill-gotten earnings from the Creek Marina project in connivance with the bank staff, the letter said.
"The owners of the project have engaged in illegal conduct by using underground banking to take money out of Pakistan," it said adding Nasim and his accomplices had sent millions of dollars to Singapore through benami transactions and fraudulent bank accounts.
The allottees also found considerable irregularities in the manner the DHA had allotted the Rs 46 billion public land to the fraudulent company against deferred consideration.
"It is strange and illegal that whilst contracting with MSPL, DHA had executed lease over valuable public land to companies which are ultimately owned by a single person" Nasim, who at the time was an employee and not owner of MSPL, the letter said.
The project is owned by one shell company after another and it would be literally impossible for anyone to litigate against its true owner in case of a default.
"It is impossible for DHA, any investor, or the public-at-large to ascertain who the ultimate owner/beneficiary of the project is," the allottees told PAC.
However, it has come to light that Shahzad Nasim is the owner of Creek Marina Pvt. Ltd. and he was an employee and not the owner of MSPL at the time of the grant of the lease.
The FIA's findings suggest that Creek Marina Pvt. Ltd.’s parent company Creek Marina Singapore PTE Limited is owned by Swiftearn Holding Limited, a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Further, the Panama Papers revealed that John George Collin Gee, a British banker of Singaporean origin and an expert in setting up offshore companies and money laundering, is the chief executive officer of Creek Marina.
last year, in December, Aisha Varsey and Salman Khan, impersonated the officials of Creek Marina Pvt. Limited and MSPL, had allegedly minted a huge amount of money from the troubled allottees through creating dubious WhatsApp and Instagram accounts.
The two accused, one of them, Varsey, recently having resigned from CMPL as a CEO, appeared to have no connection with any of the companies nor did they have any exposure in the field of real estate.
"Nearly 300 allottees are affected by the failure of Shehzad Nasim and his cohorts in delivering the Creek Marina Project," said the letter. Nasim is estimated to have misappropriated and siphoned off more than Rs3 billion of public money, it added.
Copyright Mettis Link News
Posted on: 2023-08-12T08:43:54+05:00
